Gadgetory

hey everyone I'm Steve from gamers Nexis net and we're here at Corsairs sweet in the Palazzo at CES 2016 i'm joined by george matrice and all of this coverage is brought to you by iWay powers revolt 2 small form-factor gaming pc today we're going to be talking about the tooling of cases it's sort of an interesting topic so can you give people a brief overview of what exactly is tool and what do you mean when you say tooling for a case yeah ok so basically when you manufacture a chassis like this there's you know steel components and the majority of structure of steel or aluminum most the time we use steel because it's a little bit more rigid and it's a lot less costly and it's no benefit to make the chassis out of aluminum except for weight savings which isn't really that big a difference when you talk about chassis so when we talk about tooling what happens is they have these giant stamping machines and various other machines that they take a flat roll of steel in a certain thickness whether it be 0.6 or 0.8 or 1.0 millimeters whatever and they take that and they run it through and they stamp out and cut the shape of the parts right and then those parts get stamped and sometimes it's multiple stages so they'll take one to cut the outline and then the next one will bend a frame and the next part will do this in this and so there's multi stage tooling and those tools that though the presses are a big machine of the factory but the the insert that goes in the press to cut out the right shape that's called a tool and that tool has to be manufactured specifically for each piece you want to make so for a typical case you're looking at what could be in dozens or even like a hundred plus different tools they have to be assembled and manufacture sometimes to get this done that doesn't even count the plastic injection molds and all that stuff so for a steel it's it's really complex and how many parts get made so if you look at something like a 600 q like this one this side panel is a big flat sheet of steel now it looks like it might be really easy to do but if you take it off you'll realize it's bent over itself a couple times now for structural integrity and make it the lip so it fits in there there's screw holes in the back so you can fit the thumb screws in all that stuff has to be done in a stamping and the machining set and so this is probably like a two or three stage tool for just that side panel something more complex like a motherboard or the rear fan mounts with a PCI Express slots and all that stuff that might be a six or seven step tool stage so as this is the cooling process when you're actually stamping it out is that automated are there operators it's a mix depending on which factories you go to some of them are more automated than others most of them have some level of operator whether it's an operator they're running the stamp machine or the touring machine depending on which you know which factory you're talking about most of them are mostly manual but there are a lot of automation things happening more and more and one of the big things that you can tell just by looking at case is a sort of thickness or rigidity of the steel how does that impact when you're assembling the final product how does that impact the users perception or experience or quality you know when you're getting yeah so I think that you know a lot of people will take a case off and buy it out and you take into the box you say wow this thing feels really sturdy and most the time that's based on weight they pick it up and it's heavy they go oh this is very expensive and if it's light they go oh this is the opposite the opposite is actually kind of true which is that like it's not so much weight is it about the the rigidity so the torsional rigidity like if you take a case like this and you try and twist it like then you actually see how well it's manufactured and how strong it is right and that's basically cuz it's basically a big cube with a motherboard tray that acts as the support so the motherboard tray is actually a really critical support element in most modern chassis cuz it's fastened to the top the back in the bottom and sometimes even the front of the case so it acts as kind of the main frame that everything connects to and then the corners have you know rivets or screws to hold everything together right and then the side panels once they're on act as kind of another way to keep the thing torsionally structurally sound so if you have for example a really really thin steel case some of the really really cheap stuff you can find like these $20 cases or with like point 4 or 5 or 0.5 millimeter steel which is really really flexible like you could easily bend it with your hands those cases even with the side panels on they're not very structurally sound if you go up to 0.6 0.8 1.0 you'll see that structural rigidity improve a lot and especially if things you want to do put on this case for example we have a steel front over this plastic frame that then snaps onto another steel chassis part so it's actually like a multi-layer it's like steel plastic steel and this one has sound and being in the middle of that too so that multi-layer has a lot of structural rigidity makes it feel really solid for like the spec alpha we have that big plastic mold on the front and top or like something like an NZXT phantom case with a big plastic anything with a lot of plastic on it it's really important to make sure that the structural of the structure of the case is solid underneath so you don't have huge panel gaps and things like that which is like you know here in this case this consistent panel gap across here this is really important too for a level of quality and consistency right so you know this level of panel gap here is really critical any case where you have a lot of different pieces meeting together especially in here with a front door for example where that door has to open and close and you still want that same panel gap top and bottom assuming with cars you know the panel gaps in the the hood and the doors and the whole line should be consistent throughout the case and through the car so we kind of look at it that way so that's all largely affected by tooling then yeah so it's it's not just tooling but also manufacturing and tolerance gaps so there's a thing it's called a kind of a taunt stack right so if the base level which is your chassis steel top something like at s340 has one standard stamped three stamped piece of steel on top that's it it's stamped piece of steel and it's painted right and that's a very easy thing because it's once is one piece of steel it's cheap it's easy to do and you're done if you add something on top of that like for let's say this thing right this has a stamped steel piece on top but it also has this dust filter here right so it's important because we wanted to have this magnetic dust filter this has to fit in an inlay so we had to stamp that in way into that we had to make sure that when we cut this and we we have the magnets in here they fit onto a point in there where it sits flush and then we had to make sure that the it's consistent so that when we make this in six months it's the same as if we make it today and the tool has to be made to a certain level of quality so the tool doesn't wear down over time and and everyone will wear down at some point the higher end tools will last for years the cheaper ones could last a couple months and so depending on how well this is all done you could have cases that launch really well and then end up with craft quality six months later or cases that you know much really well and there's still the same quality years later so and then that's all very expensive to do so if you're gonna custom tool a chassis from the ground up where you take every piece completely and tool it up like these two cases were done completely custom that can be literally hundreds of thousands or a million dollars you know to tool up something so I mean for example I don't know for a fact but I was told that the HP Blackbird case that HP had a couple years back that case I heard was like almost three million dollars in tooling the foot alone is like a $200,000 cast aluminum part you know so it's like just a tool that part it's not cheap we don't have that kind of a three million dollar tooling budget or anything but these are definitely hundreds of thousands to you know up to a million bucks of tooling like a 900 d is a very expensive case to tool there's a lot of parts the primary cost of the tooling is part counts so how many parts are in the case is kind of how much this ruling will cost and then how come Plex the tooling is how many stages of stamps and things like that the next and so the the goal is to reduce the number and so do what you need to do in as few steps as possible so simplify and make things easier and basic so that we don't have to spend you know six hundred thousand dollars to make every new case you know and so that's why we use the same chassis for a lot of different cases so once we 12 a good custom chassis like the 400 C and 400 Q share the same exact case but in the next three four years you might see five or six different cases based off this skeleton so we use this kind of called a mannequin approach when we build a mannequin and we dress it up with different things right the spec awful is a good example we use the spec Oh two no three chassis and took out the optical drive base tweaked a little bit of the tooling so we spent a little bit of money the tools some parts of the inside and completely new plastic front and side panels and feet that was a lot cheaper than doing the whole thing from scratch very cool so that's an inside look at tulane manufacturing more than you ever wanted to know about really boring stuff that I spent the last six years of my life working on but very cool and perfect fit for the channel as always thank you for watching if you like this type of coverage hit the patreon link the post roll video we have more information in an article on the Corsair suite and everything that's in here so check all that out and I'll see you all next time